South Korea Up Broadband Speed to One Gigabit

Posted on: 11 March 2011

By:Patrick Oliphant

When some of us in the West can brag about having 50M broadband and can only talk about 100M, South Korea is planning to give its citizen broadband speed some of us can only dream of. According to the New York Times South Korea is moving it broadband speed up another level to one gigabit per second. The country is piloting the project at the moment and hope to have it completely rolled out by the end of 2012.

At the end of next year the broadband speed in South Koreans homes will be more than 200 times as fast as the average connection in the US and 166 times the average in the UK. Although countries across the globe are trying to implement different initiatives to give more of their citizen faster access to the internet South Korea is far ahead. They are rank No.1 in the world standing with Hong Kong and Japan coming after at No.2 and 3 respectively.

I think that as more businesses are done over the web, countries that don’t invest in their internet connection infrastructure will lose out on many opportunities to be more productive and generate more wealth. Research buy Cisco shows that the consumption of digital content will quadruple by 2014.

Other develop countries trailing behind will need to start boosting their broadband infrastructure, because as more of use start digitising our home the speed will be needed. Home will need this increase speed to take advantage of connected TV services and cloud services, just to name two.